Make the wedding ring speak to her

It’s a nice touch to engrave a heartfelt message on a wedding band, and my couples choose to do so. But you can say a lot more with a 20 second audio message. That’s exactly what [Luke Jerram] did by etching an audio track into this ring. He uses his custom-built hardware to playback the message, which you can see in the video after the break. The ring is an Edison Cylinder, which works just like a modern record player except that the media is on a spinning drum (the ring) instead of a rotating disk. We wonder if this would sound a bit better with a high-end cylinder player.

While you’re on [Luke’s] page you might as well take a look at his image projecting ring as well. It has a color image slide on one side and a projection lens on the other. Wacky!

me: Try clicking the links HaD helpfully provides to the original project. The message is literally the second paragraph on the page. Depending on your screen size, you may have to move the scroll wheel a bit.

Excuse my ignorance, but how “soft” is silver? He mentions in his blog that it took 100 lbf/in² of pressure to cut the silver, but my concern is that normal wear would make it useless in a short period of time.

Really cool idea, but for something like that I’m sure she’d like to keep the message around for a while.

A less old school/romantic, but way more efficient way of doing this would be to make your own encoding and use maybe… holes of different sizes and then let a laser read it. It could output a string that could be interpreted by a machine as text to speech.

cool, and i think the audio is decent for the recording method used, but why does the device keep playing audio after the needle is removed? watching the video, it seems more like the needle is just scraping on the ring, making a loud scraping noise, and the actual recording is coming from another source, since the scraping should be amplified making the audio output intolerable, and the recording keeps playing as if it were a record or tape playing at a decreasing speed, yet the needle is no longer touching the ring and it didn’t appear to slow down before the needle was removed.

People ask so I’m taking my guess: Played backwards it says, “Half of all I own is yours.”

Definitely a cool idea. I love to find a way to improve either the sound or the lifetime of the sound.

I wonder if some metals other than gold that are more durable can be used in sputter coating objects intended for electron microscopy? Then again, would the heat needed in the process deform the grooves in metal ring? Just thinking alound…

You could write it on the inside I guess, that will prevent scratches and make it look less like a ring that had an accident, I’m sure you can design a device to read from the inside of it just as well, although the space would be reduced then I guess.
Also I wonder if you can’t go digital and use pits or something to record it, in a not too complex and propriety way so it remains recognizable in the far future though, but again then you need very small pits or have very little room.
I find the concept sort of interesting to think that in hundreds of years they could hear the message, it has a certain charm.

And incidentally, gold is incredibly durable, there lies the source of its value, it’s quite inert and doesn’t rust and such, the problem is though that pure gold is very soft and can be dented by the mere forces of teeth already.

It’s a lovely idea, but I feel a bit alienated by the title of this post. It’s predicated on the idea that you have absolutely no female readers, or at least that if you do have any, they’d all be lesbians.

That’s really not okay, unless your intent is to short term appeal to sexist male geeks to the exclusion of a growing group of female hackers. Even then, sexism really isn’t okay.

Jenna: You take yourself far too seriously. The only necessary assumption made here is that the man is the one making and giving the ring. While with some less traditional couples nowadays this may not be the case I think it’s still a fairly safe assumption.

image projection ring? Reminiscent of one of the Latnok rings from the show Kyle XY. He takes the ring and puts it up to a car headlight to reveal a map. sad the show got canceled right in middle of its greatness. hopefully someone will recreate the show with a similar exciting plot…anyone up for it? What would kyle xy become if it continued its plot?

Interesting idea. I did wonder about making a “Morse Ring” where there is a red LED inside that in the presence of an RF field or sufficient ambient light, as it gets dark its internal capacitor blinks out a message while in motion,..